
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 52
paraphrase Lyttleton, Mussolini was everything for everyone at once. Falasca-Zamponi
writes that Mussolini’s engagement with the arts created a “reciprocity between reality
and representation, [in which] the myth of Mussolini continued to expand, developing
independently of the regime” (56). This proliferation of Mussolini(s) was achieved
largely through a robust arts culture in both the public and private spheres—a culture
that, like the fascists, was explicitly interested in reviving antiquity.
The 2010 Guggenheim exhibit “Chaos & Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and
Germany, 1918-1936,” which was the original inspiration for this essay, exhaustively
showcased the extent to which fascism was figured as a continuation of the political and
cultural regimes of the ancient past. After the First World War, across Europe, in public,
in mainstream and avant-garde art, classicism was revived as the dominant mode of
expression—gradually moving away from frenetic representation, like Cubism, toward a
solider one.
22
In his introductory essay to the Guggenheim catalog,
23
art critic Kenneth
Silver argues that classical form represented an alternative to the terrifying, chaotic,
22
Picasso, for example, turned toward French classicism in the 20’s with paintings like
Large Bather (1921) and The Source (1921). Like the other arts, architecture moved in a
similar direction. Le Corbusier explicitly reacted against Cubism in favor of Classicism in
his manifesto “Après le cubisme.” He argues for the arts to provide an antidote to the
mess of the war. “Here [in post-Cubist art], only order and purity illuminate and orient
life; […] To the same extent that [yesterday] was troubled, uncertain of its path, that
which is beginning is lucid and clear” (Silver 20). Stanislaus van Moos writes in his Le
Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis that Le Corbusier, like other intellectuals of the time,
argued that Cubism was an “elitist escape” and an “esoteric game with ornamental
forms” (Van Moos 48). Classicism, on the other hand, was a purer form, linked to an
eternal past of cleanliness and coherence.
23
Studies in this art are relatively new, and the Guggenheim exhibit organized by Silver
represents the most public display of this kind of work. Before him, the most famous
essay on the subject is Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of
Regression: Notes on the Return to Representation in European Painting” in October
magazine. But unlike Silver, Buchloh treats all returns to “order” as the same across
Europe, thereby erasing the meaningful differences between the many fascisms and
classicisms that Silver emphasizes.